


Scary Monsters

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst and Humor, Blood and Injury, Body Modification, Gallows Humor, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2018-12-09 01:25:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11658714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Nyx is an immortal monster hunter, taking on the contract of a mad scientist gone grave robber. But Noctis is way too damn pretty to be a creepy corpse chopper in a haunted castle. And the creature he put together with those dead bodies is... a first.





	1. monster mash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nicrt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicrt/gifts).



> For nicrt to help slay schoolwork! And yes, this is what Tredd gets for shaving in a moving vehicle.

This was not the first time he’d been shot through the heart. But it was the first time he’d been shot _through the heart._

Nyx Ulric had been on this earth for a long, _long_ time. _Too_ long, in even his own opinion. And in all that time, he’d never been quite as stunned by a bullet to the chest as he was now, bleeding out on the lab’s stone floor.

He’d seen a lot of shit and didn’t have a whole lot left of his own to give. Most often, that got him into more trouble than some of his contracts might have been worth – namely this one – but he couldn’t be too choosy about his pay. Immortality did not, as popular fiction liked to romanticize, come pre-loaded with the perks of a limitless bank account and the undying charm needed to keep it full.

It was an accidental curse intended as a blessing by his dying sister, a sorceress that never got to learn the full potential of her powers before burning in the Niflheim purge of Galahd. Selena had cast the spell to protect him at the cost of her own life. The sight of her smile and her shaking arms out-stretched, delirious with relief just before the sword plunged out from the front of her chest, haunted him into the well-meaning eternity her magic had condemned him to.

The charm should have followed her spirit when it was dragged from her body. Yet, he endured. In the century since her death, he’d beaten his brain bloody trying to understand how he still breathed when she did not. There was a whole decade, early on in his un-death, where he’d gone so mad with the grief of his fate and the isolation of it that he convinced himself the truth of his curse was that Selena’s spirit still lingered beside him. In some plane that he could not see, but was close enough to Eos for her to hold her magic. She was watching over him, stuck in a state between life and death, and was just as alone as he was. Too alone to let him go.

He tried to embrace eternity as a gift, but the world was making it damn hard to feel blessed when it liked to unload the worst of its shit on his shoulders.

He had a long memory, but he couldn’t remember why or how he got into this particular line of work, hunting down the monsters left-over by the war while pretending he wasn’t one of them. Mutants and revenants and mercenary witches populated the dark holes leftover in Lucis from the Niflheim shells. Not all of them were content to cohabitate with the humans that had created them to be cannon fodder.

Wanted posters were stuck up in the bars. Nyx took them down.

For a little under a hundred years, he’d brought the heads of skin-changers and bloodsuckers and daemons to the people paying for them, all leftover experiments unleashed from the armies of both sides. In all of those years, he’d been mauled and gnawed and sliced up and shot at and had his mind snapped in half by so many psychokinetic assholes that it must have looked like a toddler’s art project. It helped to keep him crazy enough to come back for more.

And to fall a little bit in love with the equally crazy scientist holding a gun to his head.

Definitely not a warlock like the notice said. But he _was_ summoning the undead… kind of.

“You are so hot with a pistol in your hands,” the stitched-together corpse on the table said.

“I told you to play dead,” the man above Nyx barked back.

“Can’t really play when I’m living that hella dead life.”

The cadaver climbed off of the operating table, bouncing on the balls of his brand new feet when they hit the floor. Nyx had seen some shit. A lot of shit. But this… this was a first. A human male made entirely of stolen tissue. And a _living_ human male, at that. Maybe the raven-haired scientist looming over him wasn’t a warlock, per se, but he must have adapted some kind of golem magic to make that thing work. Because if a hundred years had taught Nyx anything other than self-loathing and psychosis, it was that science could not bring back the dead.

They tried, constantly and especially after the war was over. After the advancements they’d made in mutated genes in manufacturing their humanoid weapons, scientists across the globe thought that they could play gods and reanimate the casualties of war. Forgetting that science had never been what crafted these things in the first place. Black magic and necromancers masquerading as innovators had warped the methods of madness, not chemicals and formulae and genetic ingenuity.

So, it was maybe magic. But Nyx couldn’t quite tell yet if it was dangerous. The contract on the man that made it hadn’t been completely honest. Nyx wasn’t sure if he could trust its warnings to apply to the walking corpse, either.

He took the contract because the name had stuck out to him. He knew of Caelums a hundred years ago. A family of high esteem and philanthropic accolades. Scientists, lawyers – in some circles, _gangsters_ – the Caelum dynasty were practically kings. Nyx had stopped paying attention to the news, the only place he ever saw anything on the family when he wasn’t glancing at magazine covers in shop windows. He hadn’t noticed that the family fortune had gone into decline since the cessation of the war. So, to find a contract out for one Noctis Lucis Caelum was a nostalgic surprise… and perhaps a little petty on his part. He got to give just desserts to an heir spoiled with the money profited off of his people’s lost lives. The first time in a hundred years where Nyx really appreciated irony.

Didn’t appreciate it turning back on him when he walked into the dingy lab and was greeted by two holes in his chest to compliment the bright blue eyes glaring down at him.

“Why aren’t you dead?” the contract – Noctis – snarled, gripping the pistol with both hands to try and keep them from shaking.

“Wouldn’t I like to know?”

Nyx sat up, shirt heavy with blood, and nearly got shot again for how the movement startled Noctis. He was harmless, Nyx decided, contrary to what the bright color on his chest might suggest. He was more afraid of Nyx than even the bar folk whispering about the contract had been of him. The mis-matched limbs on the red-head flexing his fingers nearby might be unsettling to more cohesively constructed folk, but a monster was made by its deeds, not by its appearance.

Nyx glanced up at the man behind the madness again, his boots caked in grave-soil from long nights stealing into cemeteries for the necessary appendages to make his little project work. That should have repulsed Nyx, but what the hell, he was dead. And he didn’t think he would mind giving an arm or a leg to that pretty face. Long black hair pulled into a messy tail, errant strands framing a pale, bearded face in inky disarray. And he had eyes as blue as the rivers in midsummer Nyx could still remember swimming in when he was a child.

Not what he was expecting from a mad scientist. Nor was he expecting the monster he’d created to be quite so… animated.

“Damn, Noct! You sure know how to treat a dead guy right,” the walking corpse said, admiring the musculature of his sewn-on arms, flexing like a Herculian superhero.

He wandered over to a table of glass beakers and jars and other such containers, picking up the clearest one to gawk at his own reflection. Flame-red hair, shrewd brown eyes, a strong square face marred with a long, crooked scar from the edge of his mouth back to his ginger side-burns.

“What happened here?” the (thing? man?) asked.

“The guy was shot in the face. I hope. That or it was a freak shaving accident,” Noctis replied, as if he’d known the newly animated creature all of his life.

“Welp, that sounds like me. Good choice, then! I like it. Makes me look a little more edgy, gives me an air of danger and mystique. Nice conversation starter. ‘How’d you get that scar?’ ‘It was back in the war, baby. It was just me and a coven of vampires, out in the wastelands. Ugly fuckers and mean, too. It was three to one. The odds were against me, but I had a gun and my wits and made it out to tell the tale. Not before the last one gave me this to remember him by.’”

He tested a very serious nod in the beaker’s reflection to compliment his story and Nyx had to laugh where he sat. Half out of awe for how ridiculous the thing was and awe for how _amazing_ it was. When he’d walked into the lab, it had been nothing but a neatly arranged puzzle of dead stolen flesh. Then the attractive man with the rolled up sleeves and determination drawn over his face pulled a lever, bolted the thing with an electric shock before Nyx could reveal himself to stop him, and the thing jolted upright, gasping with such a loud “fuck!” it had made even Nyx jump.

He would have never expected that to be the first word out of a reanimated corpse’s mouth. Because he wouldn’t expect a reanimated corpse to speak at all. Maybe a few grunts or growls and low moans. But to fully articulate an original sentence and to come pre-loaded with the arrogant swagger to match was just… unheard of. Not even in a hundred years.

“Who are you and what are you even doing out here?” Noctis asked him, distracted between how the bullets in Nyx’s chest hadn’t killed him and how his walking project was functioning.

“Someone didn’t like you digging up dead bodies after midnight and sent me to put those bodies back into the ground, yours in a new grave next to them,” Nyx told him without hesitation, too amused by the situation to feel like he had to hide his intentions. “Grave robbery is a crime now, but hey. If they really wanted to enforce that law then they should be arresting every general between here and Niflheim, huh?”

Noctis scrutinized him from behind his gun, glancing between his face and the wound in his chest, more confounded by the fact it hadn’t killed him than he was about someone putting a bounty on his head.

“Take it from someone who’s been in a grave,” the red-headed amalgamation said, stroking the light scruff beneath his chin in his reflection. “Not fun times. Avoid someone putting you in one, Noct.”

“Are you going to?” Noctis asked Nyx, steadying his hands around the gun in warning. “Put me in a grave?”

“Depends.” He nodded to the revenant. “What did you make him for?”

That drew the manmade man’s attention off of his reflection, thick brows coming together as he looked at his creator, expecting an answer as much as Nyx was. Noctis blinked, put on the spot, as if Nyx had asked him who he was taking to the prom rather than who he’d just built from the dead. For a second, Nyx thought that the man would rather shoot him again than answer, given the imperceptible touch of pink that speckled across his cheeks. He didn’t know if it was in realizing the uselessness of trying to shoot Nyx or meeting the inquisitive pout of his creation that conceded him into answering. Either way, the bedraggled grave robber sighed and lowered his gun, avoiding both of their stares.

“I was lonely,” he murmured. “I made Tredd because I wanted a friend.”

“Tredd” pondered over the name, testing it with his new voice as if it was the first time he had heard it. He paced around the lab, muttering the name to himself over and over again, trying out different tones to see if he liked how it sounded in each.

“Hi, my name is Tredd, how may I help you this evening?” he said in an even monotone.

“Yo, I’m Tredd! What’s up?” he said in a lilting greeting.

“Tredd,” he said, standing straight and extending his hand to an invisible partner, bowing and looking up with a wink. “Charmed.”

“He’s an asshole, but he’s harmless,” Noctis huffed, dark ropes of hair lifting beneath his breath.

“Well, if he takes after you, I might doubt that,” Nyx snorted, nodding at the man’s gun.

“Harmless to you.”

Noctis set the gun on his desk, atop a messy sprawl of anatomy sketches. He folded his arms and leaned against the edge, a long, lithe shadow; all fine, smooth lines beneath mud-spattered and stained, black clothes. It wasn’t hard to imagine where the stains came from, even if the red-brown smudges were less prominent on dark clothes. He wondered if that was why he chose the color palette, or if he really knew how damn good he looked in black. Noctis’ eyes slanted, the blues darkening with intrigue as he stared at Nyx.

“You can’t be like Tredd,” he mused. “Can’t be a vampire, otherwise you’re a very slow one.”

“And I suppose you’re the leading expert on the undead?” Nyx rose to his feet, wringing out the blood on his shirt like a wet towel. “What I am doesn’t matter, just that I can’t be killed. So, save your bullets for the village people and their pitchforks if they don’t believe I didn’t kill you.”

“They bringing torches, too?” Tredd asked, walking closer and still astounding Nyx with how quick and level his stride was. “Because I have the damndest feeling that fire and dead stuff doesn’t mix.”

Noctis glanced at him, his stare hard with thought for a long moment before his forehead smoothed and he pushed off the desk, muttering, “Clothes.”

He trotted around the room looking for the items in question, leaving Nyx to analyze his science project. He really did chop up a bunch of fine specimens. They were tough guys, he figured. Tredd had legs toned and long and powerful, like they’d spent a lot of time running. His arms were firm and built, the left baring a tattoo of a vintage pin-up model. Which brought to mind a myriad of questions about just how developed Tredd was and if he wielded enough agency to recognize his own sexuality or identity or any preference. Did he just wake up from nowhere, and knew what his favorite food was? Did he know if he liked it hot or cold? Did he have memory? He must have, and it must have been some memory with Noctis, but Nyx couldn’t fathom how. Tredd seemed to know Noctis, talked to him like they had already been friends before Noctis had put him together.

A familiar brain in unfamiliar flesh? Did Noctis carry around a bodiless companion’s brain until he gathered the right flesh to put it in? Could a brain even live without a body? He thought he’d seen a science fiction movie once where that worked, but that was _fiction_. He wasn’t a super genius like maybe Noctis and all of the Caelums that had been idolized before him were, but he knew that there had to be more to plugging in a brain to a dead body. Where did Tredd get his already evident personality from? One bolt of electricity and he was a fully functioning human again? There had to be some kind of magic involved.

“I’d let you stare all night long if you really wanted to, but I’m betting Noct wants to put about a hundred miles between us and this town.”

Tredd smirked at him, a smile that looked deeper and more cunning with the scar along his cheek. Noctis threw some dirty clothes at him as he passed between them, proceeding to collect a medical bag and a coat from the other side of the room.

“Yeah, that would be wise,” Nyx agreed, watching the both of them, Tredd with a more keen interest as he slipped into the soiled outfit as effortlessly as if he’d done it every day for a lifetime. “You’re gonna have to stay clear of this place. Ruin my reputation if people see a contract I said I buried walking around the farmer’s market.”

Noctis pulled on his trench coat, black as night and tapered around the waist and killing Nyx with how it contoured to his body. “You’re not really going to cover for us, are you?” he asked in disbelief.

“I’m covering for myself, please,” Nyx snorted. “Still need to get paid. People tend to take the word of a professional when they have problems like this. They want it over and done with, and they want it done quick. Problem’s taken care of. If I tell them you’re dead, you’re dead. You think the guy that put a bounty on a grave robber is going to check your grave by robbing it back?”

“In this gods-fearing city?” Tredd grunted, every word out of his tarnished mouth giving Nyx more questions than he was able to get answers to.

Tredd was dressed and Noctis was stuffing whatever incriminating pages he could into his bag before ushering the sewn-up man to the lab doors. He paused to turn back to Nyx, his eyes wide with gratitude and the mysteries of science and magic and the secret to life itself, so it seemed. A maddening flicker of thought pulsed in Nyx’s head. If this man could bring back life when it should not be returned, he wondered if he could take it away from where it would not leave. He wouldn’t be able to ask that of him, though.

“Thank you,” Noctis said in relieved desperation. “Your name?”

“Nyx. Though you won’t need to know it. I don’t expect we’ll be seeing each other again, Noctis. Tredd.”

He truly believed that when he said it. And he believed well after he’d staged an appropriate grave in the preferred spot and convinced the contract holder that all the bodies he requested be buried there were accounted for. He believed the entire night’s drive into the dusky city of Lestallum and for the restless sleep at the Leville.

He believed it right up until he was filling up his tank at the gas station, ready to move on when a loud and amazed “fuck” was, yet again, the first word out of Tredd’s mouth.


	2. grave encounters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How did Tredd even _work?_ Nyx aims to find out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Ficmas, Insy! I haven't forgotten about this and hope your Tredd-crush is still as prominent as I remember lol

“How does that even work?”

Nyx didn’t realize he’d asked the question out loud until the two – technically more than two – men looked up at him. Tredd had a forkful of rice and curry shoved in his mouth. While Nyx had been asking Noctis the most questions – about _why_ he did what he did, _where_ he planned on going, _how_ he pissed off people enough for them to catch wind of his experiments to put a bounty on him – Nyx had more questions about how Tredd even _worked._

He shoveled in food like a man starved – ten, maybe twelve men made him up now? – but Nyx had no idea how he could even eat. He was all dead tissue, wasn’t he? How was he even digesting all of that? Could he even _taste_ it? Did his digestive system work with the functioning brain Noctis had somehow reanimated? Or did the food just sit in his stomach until… Nyx didn’t even want to think about how it could come out.

If he thought too hard about how Tredd worked, he felt dizzy. No creature had ever stunned him as viciously as this one. Perhaps because he wasn’t really a _creature._ He was a man, talked like one, ate like one, walked like one, but all the laws of supernatural activity that Nyx had gotten used to abiding told him that Tredd was far, _far_ from a man. The mess of sinewy scars against his neck could attest to that.

Noctis had found him clothes from the lab, thank the gods, because Nyx had already seen far too much of Tredd when he was bleeding out on the laboratory floor. He’d managed to cover up most of the telling scars that revealed Tredd as something otherworldly. There was still a sickly, dark pallor to his skin that he could do nothing about except for excuse him as being very ill. It made the red blaze of Tredd’s hair that much more shocking.

Noctis looked between Tredd and Nyx as his creation resumed chewing, grunting at the scientist to try and explain it if he wished. Nyx was guessing that Tredd was as oblivious as he was as to how his patchwork body functioned.

“Lots of scientific mumbo jumbo,” was all Noctis cared to explain.

Honestly, that’s all Nyx really needed to know. The logistics of reanimating dead tissue was far beyond his capabilities to understand. He didn’t need to know how a thing worked, how it could be explained, he just needed to know how to kill it or keep it from killing him. Most of these dark magic aberrations were too deadly to consider scientifically. There was never any time to be curious before Nyx had teeth ripping into his throat or claws tearing at his intestines.

As Noctis had promised, Tredd seemed harmless. A bit cocksure and he had a sharp tongue that could put him in more danger than anyone else, but otherwise, totally inoffensive. Which was part of where Nyx’s curiosity stemmed from. Why make him if not to use him in some way? Why go through the trouble of digging up bodies and manipulating them into a new one if not to craft some sort of weapon or something of greater value? He wasn’t sure he believed Noctis when he said he just “wanted a friend.”

Noctis was vague about his motives, no matter how hard Nyx pressed him about them. The only hint of a threat he ever felt from Tredd was when he made Noctis uncomfortable. Nyx would feel the creature’s eyes focus in from his food and harden to razor points. He would hear his jaw stop working on the rice and his hands still with knife and fork. He would feel the air change between them, grow colder with an unsaid warning should Nyx not cease his pestering of the scientist. Interesting, that.

Tredd wasn’t dangerous on principle though. And neither was Noctis. And that _wasn’t_ because he thought he was pretty. Long, messy black hair pulled back in a short ponytail, feathery strands framing his face and brushing along his chin where the shadow of a beard remained. Sharp, angular features, pale skin, eyes blue and bruised with sleepless gloom. He looked more like a corpse himself sometimes, a perfect match for the smart-talking automaton beside him.

Nyx could guess as to a little of what might be between the two. Tredd – or whoever’s brain he was carrying – seemed more than familiar with Noctis when Nyx first heard them talking as he broke into the lab. In fact, he seemed intimately familiar with him, but Nyx wasn’t sure if that was just in Tredd’s flirtatious nature, or if they had somehow, somewhere, been an item of some sort.

He had so many questions. None of which Noctis felt warranted an answer. They must have been personal.

“So, what’s the plan?” Nyx asked instead, when his prodding about Noct’s motives was chasing the scientist behind his own eyes and earning him more glares from Tredd than answers from Noctis. “Where do you two plan on going?”

Noctis averted his eyes, cheek caving as he bit the inside of his mouth. He dragged his spoon through his soup, watching the contents spin. The people of Lestallum hadn’t given any of them a second glance. While Noctis was skittish when they sat down to the outdoor table at Tostwell Grill, constantly glancing from person to person that passed them as if he expected them to pull a pitchfork from beneath their tank-tops, he had quickly learned to settle enough to get some food in him. Lestallum was a close network of corners and curbs, cluttered with stalls and shops and pipes blowing steam. Even when sitting out in the open, it still felt closed off from the rest of the world. It wasn’t quite enough to make Noctis feel safe enough to reveal his plans. If he even had any to begin with.

Nyx tried to wait him out, shearing off meat from his spicy skewers. He didn’t know why he was so adamant about knowing the details of Noct’s and Tredd’s future. It wasn’t like he planned on pursuing them any further. He’d made his lies, made his pay, and didn’t have to stick around the story for this bounty any longer.

He told himself it _wasn’t_ because he liked Noctis. He told himself that it had nothing to do with feeling starstruck with a bullet shot through him on the laboratory floor. He insisted that he was a professional, that attractiveness did not factor into his own motivations. Nor did curiosity. Noctis and Tredd were a bag of both… and he was just outright lying to himself if he didn’t want to know more.

“You don’t have a plan, do you?” he finally said when Noctis could give him no answer.

The scientist glanced at Tredd, perfectly happy with licking his bowl clean and reaching for the next one. Nyx had treated them to whatever they wanted with the bounty he got for them. He felt like they deserved it. He’d never expected Tredd to have such an appetite. He ordered one of everything on the small menu. While it wasn’t much by Galdin Quay’s standards, it was a lot for one person.

But he was ravenous. Nyx had no idea if that should worry him or not. What if he never stopped being hungry? What if that was where the danger lied? What if he was only safe when he was eating? What was to stop him from pursuing his hunger to the hand feeding him if regular food wasn’t enough?

“I’m working on it,” Noctis assured him, watching Tredd eat if only to avoid Nyx’s stare.

“Are you now.”

Noctis shot him a glare, but it didn’t have any of the spite in it as the first time he’d looked at Nyx, standing over his not-dying corpse with a gun in his hands and Tredd’s crowing of delight behind him. His eyes looked tired, more restless than a missing night of sleep. He’d barely been out from under Nyx’s nose for a day and he looked like he’d gone ten years without sleeping. He looked downtrodden, _weak_ , even. Something about the slump of his shoulders as he leaned his elbows against the table to keep his face from falling in his soup made Nyx’s stomach twist.

“I’ll… We’ll figure it out. I got us this far, I can get us the rest of the way.”

“Rest of the way to where?”

Noctis’s jaw clenched down, as if he was holding back a scream at Nyx for his insistent questions. He dropped his spoon and made to get to his feet.

“Fuck it. Get up, Tredd. We’ll get the rest to go.”

Tredd nearly choked on the bowl of soup he was tipping down his throat at the abruptness of Noct’s retreat. But he didn’t complain, merely set the bowl back on the table and raised a hand to his chin to catch the stray droplets before scrambling out of his chair to follow him.

Nyx was on his feet before Noctis had taken half a step, hand clamped around his arm like an iron shackle. Noctis whipped a glare at him, hair falling in his face and eyes shining with outrage. And something else. Something he didn’t want Nyx to see so, he shoved it deep down within his eyes, let it knot inside his throat to save for later. His voice was shaking, and Nyx knew it wasn’t from the anger he threw up like a shield.

“Get your hands off me.”

“Sit. Down. I’m not done with you.”

He wasn’t surprised when Tredd’s cold hand came down around his arm like a vice. He had kind of been hoping that Tredd would come to his defense, just to test the limits of his patience, just to see if he really wasn’t as dangerous as he appeared to be, to test his theory about how he might have felt about Noctis. He wasn’t sure if it was out of personal attachment or some sort of programmed protectiveness, but one of Nyx’s suspicions was at least true. Noctis had built himself a bodyguard. One that could not be hurt or killed. That made Nyx question his motives all over again.

“Tredd, stop,” Noctis ordered, quietly, distrustful glances skittering around the grill for any faces that might be turning their way.

Tredd wasn’t a robot, at least. He didn’t release Nyx immediately upon being given an order. He wasn’t a thrall to Noctis. He seemed to have his own agency, his own agenda for protecting the scientist that had returned him to life. His eyes were steely as he glared at Nyx, judging his threat to his friend’s (boyfriend’s?) well-being as much as Nyx was judging how dangerous he might be to everyone else. After a few bated breaths, Tredd released him, and Nyx pushed Noctis back into his seat. Noctis glared up at him for the rough treatment and how Nyx now stood between him and the quickest way out of there, arms crossed and broad shoulders eclipsing the rest of the patrons of the grill.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. Wherever you’re going – and I _know_ you’re going somewhere – I’ll take you as far as that place may be.”

“I don’t want your help!” Noctis spat.

“Tough. I covered for your ass once, and if someone recognizes that pretty face of yours while you’re gallivanting across the countryside to gods know where, that’s a bounty on my head as well as on yours.”

Noctis quieted, face fuming red. Nyx didn’t know if it was because he was pissed, or because he called him pretty. He jerked a nod at Tredd, and made his intentions clear, no matter how either of the two might feel about him for it.

“And as far as he’s concerned, he’s within my job description until I’m positive that he’s not a threat to humanity. There are a lot of undead monsters out there. Whether or not you made him for good or evil, I’m going to decide.”

“Who gave you the right?” Noctis hissed. “Who the hell do you think you are that you have the authority to judge a person like that?”

He liked to think Selena had given him that right. That she had left him to wander this earth for a reason. That maybe this was what his purpose in her curse was supposed to be. Making the world as beautiful as she’d always wanted it to be. Making it safe for beings who had been as good as herself.

Noctis didn’t need to know that though. Noctis didn’t want to tell him why he brought Tredd back to life. Nyx didn’t need to tell him why he was back from the dead, too.

“I have a room at the Leville. You two can bunk with me. Finish your dinner and I’ll front the bill.”

Noctis looked ready to object. He looked ready to _fight_ if it meant getting away from Nyx. He tried not to feel too guilty about that. He didn’t want to scare them – not that either of them weren’t perfectly capable of keeping themselves safe from him. Noctis was only human and yet, he’d managed to get a damn good shot in on Nyx without any supernatural benefits of his own. While he didn’t have to fear anything from either of them, Nyx wasn’t in the market for another bullet in the brain if he could help it.

He sat back down and bore a glare into Noctis until he swiveled back around in his seat and poked at his soup. Tredd only resumed eating once a spoonful of the broth passed through Noct’s lips.

They didn’t have any other option but Nyx, and they all knew it. If Noctis knew where he was going, it was going to be hard to get there anonymously. Someone was going to ask about Tredd if they saw the scars. Someone was going to recognize Noctis if he wasn’t careful, and he’d get himself killed just like the first bounty wanted. Nyx had a feeling it wasn’t just a superstitious backwater bumpkin that felt like he was a threat. Nyx had a feeling there was more than one reason Noctis was keeping secrets from him.

He wondered if Tredd knew them. He wondered if he was complicit in whatever it was Noctis was doing. Had he volunteered for this experiment? Had they made some mutual pact before his death that Noctis could use him for whatever ends he wanted him for? Did Tredd know where they were going? Know what they were doing? Know Noct’s own mind as well as he did? Was there any magic to what Tredd was to begin with? Or was it all science, as Noctis claimed? Or was he keeping secrets about that, too?

Maybe Noctis wasn’t as entirely human as Nyx presumed. Maybe there was a touch of black magic in him. Maybe he was the one Nyx should look to for the danger. The hole in his chest certainly suggested as much.

They finished eating in silence, though Tredd was a rather noisy eater. It was something to fill the tension across the table, at least. It almost made Nyx laugh, how comical the devouring noises were. More curiosities about Tredd, too. How large was his stomach? Did he ever feel full? Could he make himself sick by eating too much? Where did the energy from all that food go? Did it benefit his system at all? Did he retain any nutrients from any of it? Was he really enjoying it? It certainly sounded like he did.

Noctis stared blankly at his soup, eating it slow enough to keep up with the dishes Tredd still had to race through. Nyx finished his skewers before both of them and sat back to watch the world around them. No one seemed to suspect them of anything. The man behind the grill bartered Galahdian with a new customer, the couple in the corner talked power plant shop over frothy mugs of beer. The city hummed around them in quiet carelessness, allowing the three outsiders their reprieve from the stresses of their first meeting and the future Nyx had unwittingly plunged them into.

It wasn’t professional, that much was clear to him when they went back to the Leville. He was curious, that was all it really was. But he would pretend it was in the best interests of the world that he was standing sentinel over the two. He would pretend that it was all for the sake of deciding if Tredd was truly a monster. He would pretend that he didn’t follow Noct’s retreat into the shower for anything other than making sure he didn’t run away when Nyx wasn’t looking.

“You plan on coming in here with me?” Noctis grunted in distaste when he caught Nyx watching him.

“You inviting me?”

He got the bathroom door slammed in his face and a very deliberate lock from the other side for that. He had nowhere to go, Nyx assured himself. There wasn’t a window to jump out of in the bathroom. Though there was a vent, he didn’t think Noctis would go that far to get away. Especially not without Tredd.

The redhead was testing out the beds, bouncing on the edge and giving an approving smile of the sweet, sinking feeling beneath his palms. They weren’t the best mattresses in all the world. Nyx had slept in plenty of motels in his eternity. They were cheap and creaky and smelled a little weird, but they were sanitary at least. Neat and clean and cool to combat the balmy Lestallum air.

“You sleep?” Nyx asked.

“Pretty sure,” Tredd said.

Nyx wondered if it was Tredd that he should be asking the questions of. Not tonight, though. The creature was already flopped back on the pillows and sighing in sleepy contentment.

He was doing this for the sake of the world, Nyx lied to himself when Noctis returned from the bathroom with dripping hair, lose sleep-clothes, and a glare that could skin the armor off of Bahamut. It had nothing to do with payback for the shot through his heart.


	3. highway to hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long strip of highway, a mad scientist's backseat driving, and an abandoned lighthouse

“I expected nothing. I’m not disappointed.”

“Oh, forgive me, Your Majesty! Were you expecting a royal convoy to escort you to your enigmatic destination?”

Noctis pinioned him with a look of icy indifference, lifting his chin and looking down at Nyx as if from some lofty throne seated high above Nyx’s head. Tredd whistled like a falling cartoon missile, starting high and ending low with an exaggerated blasting noise to punctuate Noctis plopping down in the passenger seat, further enunciating Nyx’s shame. It was fortunate for all three of them that he had none left to feel, else it would have been a flame-torch for the cadaver and an open grave for the body snatcher.

Tredd shambled into the backseat and Nyx took the wheel, turning the key in the ignition a few times to get the old fart started. The engine snuffled awake and grumbled in place, waiting for a given direction.

The car wasn’t his.

It was a rusty old convertible that hadn’t done much converting long and well before Nyx had appropriated it for his own needs. The mechanisms for the roof had soldered together from age and weather and wear, sealing it far beyond the hope of proper functionality. Its once brilliant red paintjob had dulled to a ruddy-brown, the gleaming gunmetal strips scraping back along the doors now chipped and scratched and muddy with rust. The bumper was dented, the headlights fogged over with yellow and brown, the white upholstery sun-bleached and dark gray with dirt.

The Crow’s Nest never missed it. He’d hardly expected it to come to life for him in the first place, but a little rewiring here and some sparks there and it spat back into the land of the living with a vengeance. Another undead compatriot to walk by his side for all eternity, it would seem. (Noctis wasn’t the only necromantic genius in the world, _hah_.) As far as Nyx was concerned, he’d freed that diner up a parking spot for all those hungry hunters dropping down, dead on their feet, underneath the shadow of the Taelpar arches. He’d been puttering from contract to contract with the battered old beast for months since without a single whisper of someone looking for a stolen vehicle.

He was getting fond of the old car. It had enough stains on its seats to match the bloodstains on his own soul and a colorful vocabulary out the engine to boot. Nyx felt that he’d forfeited the right to any worldly possessions when Selena severed his tether to mortality. And he’d never stayed in one place for long enough to call any space his own to fill with things he wanted to keep. He’d never been a particularly material person, not even in life and especially not in death. But he crawled along the highways with this grouchy old machine like he owned it. He felt like he really did.

They shared a mutual respect, one between man and machine. So, when Noctis scoffed at his crotchety old companion, Nyx felt justifiably defensive.

“South, huh?” Nyx said to confirm, fingers tapping against the steering wheel.

The doctor hadn’t given him anything else to go on but that. Real damn helpful. Noctis had finally decided on the heading that morning over a continental breakfast and a grudge against Nyx for never falling asleep long enough for him and Tredd to escape in the middle of the night.

They could go south a hundred different ways. There was no guarantee they would all take them to the same place, but Noctis refused to elaborate, leaving Nyx to do more guessing. It felt like that was all he’d been doing since meeting these weird renegades from the laws of nature.

He’d been guessing wrong about Noctis and his motivations and whatever secrets he was keeping about where he was going, why he’d done what he did, who he really was to have that kind of knowledge between life and death. And there was no way he was guessing right about Tredd – who he’d been, how he worked, what his purpose truly served.

But if there was anything Nyx was sure he could guess right on, it was their destination. Two runaways with a bounty on their heads from a superstitious sea of strangers keeping an eye out for them all across the country. No friends to speak of in the whole of Lucis. And they wanted to go south.

The only place to run away to down south was the Cygillan Ocean. And the only way to go from there was a boat to Accordo.

Nyx wasn’t about to dash their hopes of escaping scrutiny by reminding Noctis that Accordo was home to the holiest city in all of Eos. If he was afraid of persecution from the hills of Lucis, he had no idea what he was in for between the alleys of Altissia.

Nyx took them out the East exit of Lestallum. If his guess was correct, he was in for a lot more trouble than he’d bargained for.

* * *

He had no idea where the hell they were going.

The quickest way he knew of to reach Accordo from Lucis was by way of the ferries from Galdin Quay to Altissia. It wasn’t a very long voyage from one port to the next – it was a longer drive to reach it, to be honest. But just as he’d settled on the long, loping route across Duscae, Noctis had him veering off course.

He was the worst GPS system on the planet, tossing out abrupt changes in direction when Nyx was already aimed to pass the turn that was suddenly so pivotal to reaching their destination. Sometimes he had to turn so hard that Tredd nearly split his stitches. He would joke about his head flying off and into the windshield, laughing over the imagery to try and lighten the black mood in the front seats.

Noctis’s allure was quickly beginning to curdle. Nyx was not used to taking orders. The only soldier he’d ever been was one of fortune. Once upon a time, when there was still a war to fight, he had considered enlisting in the Lucian military. Once upon a time, he’d had something worth fighting for. Now, all he had was an exhausted old bucket of rust, a pile of man-shaped bodies in the back-seat, and a crazy scientist in the front with an attitude to match his ambition.

“Sheesh,” Tredd muttered when they were about half an hour out of Lestallum. “Lucis sure has seen some better days, huh?”

Nyx glanced up at Tredd’s reflection. The man of many men was peering out the closed car window at the scarred countryside crawling past. The land was pock-marked with craters and blemished by the remnants of the old Nif machines that used to drop their newest monstrosities onto farmhouses for field testing. Lucis wore the stains of the war’s black magic as deeply as the ones on Nyx’s car-seats. A once lush kingdom, now struggling on the scraps of life still sputtering up from it.

“Did you live here?” Nyx asked, curious as to Tredd’s wistful expression.

He shrugged, eyes eerily unblinking as he watched the world roll by. “For a time.”

“Which time was that?”

“Asking how old I am, buddy?” Tredd snickered. “Haven’t you heard that’s rude?”

“Ah. The wheezy old man time, then. Got it.”

Tredd chuckled, rolling his eyes to land on the back of the passenger seat in front of him. Noctis didn’t find Nyx nearly as amusing, staring pointedly at the road ahead of them in sullen silence. It didn’t dissuade Tredd from sidling his scarred smile up between them, elbows leaning against the edges of either seat to get a better view out the windshield.

“What about you?” he asked Nyx. “Lived in Lucis long?”

“Too long.”

“How long’s too long?”

“Way longer than you, that’s for sure.”

While Nyx’s eyes were on the road, he could feel Noctis’s probing at his face. Must have peaked his scientific curiosity enough to acknowledge his existence, at long last.

“So, bullets aren’t the only thing you’re immune to, then,” he said.

It wasn’t a question, merely an affirmation to himself. As if Nyx’s vague statement was all he needed to deduce confirmation for himself.

“Only thing I’m not immune to is your charms, Doctor.”

Tredd was much quicker to laughter than Noctis was, but while the scientist merely shook his head and rolled his eyes to return them to the road, Nyx could still spy a little more lightness at the edges of his lips than there was before.

Nyx worked on being a little bit kinder than he’d been in Lestallum for the rest of the drive. Oddly enough, Tredd, the crucial source of his malcontent, was the one to alleviate it most of all. He was still unsettling in the sense that it had only been a day or two since Nyx had seen him get up off of an operating table like it was a bunkbed. And he was still wary of his unsaid protectiveness over Noctis, unsure if he should interpret is as some universal threat or not.

But when he looked above the scar tissue, Tredd was as amiable as a Galahdian fishmonger on Sunday morning. He was a little crass, unfiltered in his thoughts – Nyx couldn’t tell if that was a character trait or a symptom of his resurrection – and he could be a bit exhausting to listen to for long periods of time, but he was friendly and funny and managed to make the drive a smidge more entertaining. The sound of his voice seemed to keep Noctis at ease too, the scientist slowly relaxing into his seat the more he chatted.

The long plains of Duscae grew rougher with rocks the closer they came to the coast. Tredd fought down the back window to get a gulp of the briny air hinting towards the sea. Noctis leaned closer to the dashboard in anticipation, his directions coming quicker and indicating to Nyx that they were very near to this mysterious port he was leading them to.

He got an idea of where exactly they were headed when he spotted the lighthouse, a tall, sharp shadow rising against a dusky sky. It was an old and abandoned place, long since erased from any maps and nameless for decades. Nyx couldn’t remember what it used to be called.

But Noctis knew.

When Nyx parked in front of a rusty fence, choked over with tall grass and weeds, Noctis’s hand froze on the door handle, caught in a moment of doubt. He looked up along the bluff, above a thick grove of trees, at the unseeing head of the lighthouse. It stared blindly out to sea, beckoning at nothing. There was a knot in Noctis’s throat and fear trembling in his hands when he finally mustered the courage to step out of the car.

Nyx followed alongside Tredd at a belated distance, all road trip teasing set aside for the moment. He recognized the hesitance in Noctis’s steps as he climbed ahead of them, the way his face turned to unremarkable terrain as if in recognition. Nyx had made this same walk, a thousand years ago, in the skeleton of cinders the Empire left of Galahd.

There was more to this lighthouse than Noctis had let on.

“Should I ask?” he murmured to Tredd, his eyes on the doctor’s back ahead of them.

“Not right now.”

He didn’t need to ask much, anyway. This had been a home to Noctis. He could see it in how sure his steps treaded over pathways that could no longer be seen beneath the brambles and the grass and the blown up sand from the beaches down below. He could see it even more clearly in how Noctis’s shoulders tensed the farther he climbed, each step telling him a truth he didn’t want to hear.

There was a ramshackle house in the shadow of the lighthouse, a patchwork of rotted boards and rusted doors. One side was encrusted with damp and salt from years of sea breeze, the other bleached bone white from a baking sun. The paint was peeling, the broken windows gnashed like teeth, and every quiet breath off the ocean made the ancient rafters within scream.

Noctis stood very still, staring at the house, his eyes as haunted by its phantasmal appearance as any ghost that might be lurking within. It took Tredd clearing his throat for the doctor to come back to himself, shuddering as if ice cold fingers had flittered down his spine.  He kept climbing, following his remembered path to the base of the lighthouse. Its front door was boarded up, the wood as rotted as the house down the hill, the nails hammering them in place black with rust.

“There’s, um…” Noctis fought to get his voice out, coughing and clearing the rawness from it to little avail. “There was an elevator… I don’t know if it’ll work, if we can even get in.”

“If there’s an elevator in there, it’s a screaming metal death trap straight to hell,” Nyx pointed out.

Noctis tensed and Tredd frowned at the structure. Nyx glanced between them. He sighed.

“Alright, step back.”

Nyx stalked up to the boarded entrance, prodding at each until he felt like he’d found the weakest ones. He’d kicked a lot of doors in his time – it was the one small pleasure of the job he enjoyed most. If he could be considered a leading expert in anything, it was breaking and entering.

The boards gave way in a weak spray of dust and loose splinters. It took a fair bit of hacking and tearing and screeching from the rusty nails to clear the entrance. Inside, it smelled like mildew and brine, like the whole building had been pickling with the seawater in its solitude.

Nyx didn’t trust the elevator. It might fail to kill him or Tredd – assuming the creature was immune to fall damage – but it would most certainly kill Noctis two times over to make up for it. Fortunately, there was a hidden stairway tucked against the back of the lighthouse that only Noctis could find. It was just barely less treacherous taking them down below than the elevator was.

It was dark and it was damp, the steps slick with sea scum. It was a slow descent, Noctis following his hand along the wall to keep his balance until they reached the underground cove.

The mouth of the cave swallowed the sunset, tucking deep russet light against the decaying dock leading to nothing at the bottom of the stairs. Noctis stepped as far out along the dock as it was safe to, frantically searching the murky black waters stagnating underfoot.

“It should be here…” Nyx nearly mistook Noctis’s whispered disbelief for the hollow murmur of the air floating in from the sea. It was such a fragile sound, shuddering with collapsed hope. “Why isn’t it here?”

“Anything could have happened, Noct,” Tredd said. “I mean, look at this place. No one’s been sailing from here for years. Maybe it sunk or someone stole it or…”

“No! It should _be here_! No one else can get down here, why…”

Nyx couldn’t even begin to guess at Noctis’s sudden anger when he wheeled around on Tredd. His eyes flashed dangerously, like a hunted animal being cornered. His whole body shook, his head turning this way and that in search of this thing that wasn’t there – a ship or something, if Nyx could guess anything. It was supposed to be their getaway. Their last hope to escape this kingdom and take his creation somewhere that wouldn’t lynch them both.

Noctis had been calm, methodical, and logical about everything since Nyx had laid eyes on him. He didn’t panic when a stranger threatened to destroy his work. His hands trembled, but his eyes were steady as he held a gun on Nyx. He was careful with his words, as spiteful about staking out on their own as it was safe to be with Nyx, watchful when they were in Lestallum. But he was at the end of his tether now, with nowhere left to go.

Tredd reached out to him, awkwardly, his fingers twitching as if he wasn’t quite sure how to use them to comfort him. Noctis didn’t give him enough time to figure it out, tearing his hands back through his hair and cursing so loudly that the whole cove echoed with it. He stormed back up the stairs and left them alone with his anguished voice beating against the walls.

* * *

He found his favorite spot up on the overlook and just let it catch the broken pieces falling off of his face.

He didn’t know what he had expected. He should have known. The whole of Lucis was hopeless, what made Caem the exception? The war had left nothing untouched. The boat was probably commandeered by the Imperial navy or pirated by desperate refugees trying to escape the kingdom before the worst of the daemons plundered the land. It was probably wrecked off the coast of some faraway land, sunken beneath the sands of the ocean floor, and crushed by the freezing black weight of the waves.

There was no way they would let them out of Galdin Quay. They’d take one look at Tredd and they would just _know._ They would never let such an “abomination” into their shimmering city across the sea. There was nothing to the north and the remnants of the Empire were to the west and to the east…

His throat ached just thinking about it. Caem was his last hope that maybe there was something left of home. If the ship was here, then maybe there was someone left that had kept it afloat. Maybe there was someone still out there left to run away to.

Maybe it wasn’t all gone after all.

But it was. Of course it was. It was all gone.

The tears were trapped in the brittle canals of his eyes. He couldn’t let them out if he wanted to. Especially not when Tredd’s shambling steps approached to try and coax them down his cheeks.

“Hey, uh, sucks about the boat. Sorry, Noct.”

He plopped down on the bench next to him, as blunt as his words. He never was really good at the whole consoling thing. Couldn’t zap that into his brain.

Night was folding over the sea, bringing the maritime chill with it. It cut right through Noctis, sharp as heartbreak. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to remember how much he had loved this place. How warm it used to feel in the summers, how quiet it was come autumn, how it used to be his secret place that he only shared with the ones he knew he could trust to keep it. It used to be sacred, his own holy sanctuary. But nothing was sacred to the Empire.

“Accordo’s overrated, anyway,” Tredd piped up, talking over the low whistle of the wind. “Bunch of trust fund hipsters over there, if you ask me. Would have been funny to freak people out though. The horrible undead monster terrorizing the streets, am I right?”

“You’re not a monster, Tredd. You’re mine.”

Noctis managed a small smile. He didn’t have many of those left in him. And he hadn’t had the time to be relieved that his crazy theory had worked. He hadn’t had time to revel in his success, to be grateful for restoring a familiar face to his side. It wasn’t perfect, not by any means, but he was his. His own small piece of a life forever lost to him. The one tiny fragment he could fix when the rest was beyond repair.

Tredd shifted against his seat, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck, and looking down at his feet. “Well, shucks, Noct,” he teased. “Guess the libido still works because that kinda made me feel all hot and bothered.”

Noctis snorted. “Got a long way to go before we figure that one out.”

A longer way still to find someplace safe to do it. Somewhere they could go where it was quiet and no one would come pounding at their door, demanding his head for his “grotesque practices.” There was still so much left to do, so many answers he needed to find, so much left he had to study. He just needed them to be safe.

He just needed to find his way home.

But in all the big, wide world around them, there was no home left for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next little project on my list to finish. A bit of a filler chapter while I work out Noct's backstory a bit and get into the groove, but the shenanigans should be back next chapter. If you're enjoying this odd little AU, remember that comments are love, comments are life.


	4. old haunts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's no better cure for sorrow and regret than a little bit of feng shui.

Tredd was just ridiculous.

Not inherently dangerous, really not so treacherously mysterious; just ridiculous.

Nothing made that plainer to Nyx than when Tredd wriggled over to him in a fashion characteristic of the humble inchworm, wrapped up in a sleeping bag.

He was too much at a loss to laugh. And Tredd’s brow was furrowed in such a depth of concentration that Nyx feared he might insult the creature if he did. It took quite a great deal of effort, some quiet grunts, and barely filtered curses before Tredd had managed to make it to the end of his limbless shimmy, but at long last, he propped himself up in his bag to sit next to Nyx.

“Phew!” he whistled once he was settled. He huffed out a breath, then grinned at Nyx. “What?” he asked of the unimpressed slack to Nyx’s expression. “Hey, ya never know, I might need the practice if one of these threads ever comes undone.”

He twisted his arms where they were trapped to his sides, an undead blanket burrito of strange excuses for odd little antics. Nyx was starting to wonder if the sole reason Noctis had stitched Tredd back to life was just because he was entertaining to have around. Noctis seemed like he was in need of a few good laughs.

The scientist was deader to the world than either of his companions, sleeping stiffly in the other bag. It was late by the time Tredd had retrieved Noctis from whatever reprieve he’d needed from failing to find what he’d hoped for underneath the lighthouse. While it wasn’t Nyx’s ideal spot to camp out for the evening, it was quiet and closed off enough from the denser wilds downhill to keep them out of sight of the daemons that roamed past midnight.

They couldn’t stay in the shack, if not because it was so rotted and worn-out, then because Noctis couldn’t bear to sleep under that particular roof. Nyx didn’t ask. The lighthouse was a tad cooler, but it was a better vantage point for him to keep a look out from. And besides that, he didn’t really mind the chill. It didn’t affect him the same way it did Noctis, warm-blooded and huddled far down into his sleeping bag to ward off the draft.

“Are you even cold?” Nyx asked Tredd, scrutinizing his choice of insulation and the distinct lack of shivering that was supposed to go with it.

Tredd shrugged. “Never really bothered me, no. But hey, no use in letting this go to waste, right?”

He shuffled in the sleeping bag, a rough and tattered rag of a thing that wouldn’t do much to keep out the cold even if it did affect Tredd. Noctis hadn’t fled his make-shift laboratory prepared for roughing it in the wilds. Nyx had a feeling he’d expected to linger in Lestallum for as long as it took him to figure out where the hell he was going – hopefully before any concerned citizens knocked on his door. He’d been counting on motel fare and street food and the relative security of four walls around him to keep the rest of the world out until he was ready to face it again.

Nyx watched Noctis for a moment, studying the temperature of his trembling, in small part from the cold and more from the fears he refused to say that caught up to him in nightmares.

“What’s in Accordo?” Nyx asked, certain that the doctor was locked deep enough in sleep not to object to him interrogating Tredd.

Not that he had much to tell him. Tredd just gave him a blank look.

“That’s where he wants to take you, isn’t it?” Nyx elaborated. “Nowhere else to go from here but Altissia, and from there, the rest of Accordo. I just assumed he would get you through the capital, then hide out somewhere in the country if you made it out of the city alive.”

“Mm, making it out to wine country,” Tredd hummed, his scarred smile as content as a cat’s purr. “If that’s the plan, I like the sounds of it.”

“Just have to make it past the torches and pitchforks first.”

Tredd snorted and rolled his eyes. “Ocean first. That’s the hard part. Fire and Cosmogony thumpers are easy.”

Not in Nyx’s experience, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “For someone that looks like he’s falling apart at the seams, you seem pretty confident.”

“Pretty sure Noct made me to last this time around.”

“How’d you bite it the first time?”

Tredd opened his mouth, then thought better and shut it again. He glanced at Noctis, jaw working as he chewed on whether or not he would approve of him sharing that particular secret. Ultimately, Tredd decided that it was his to share, whether Noctis liked it or not. He glanced back at Nyx, briefly, then shifted again in his sleeping bag, putting a few inches of distance between the two of them.

“Nothing special,” he said. “Died like a lot of people when Insomnia went down.”

“Shit…”

“Yyyup.”

His lips popped on the last letter, an innocuous echo of the last gunshot that had executed the once proud capital of Lucis. It had been ten years since the city fell to Imperial control, but Nyx, like most people in Lucis, could still remember where he was when it happened. Covered in blood and dragging a broken leg out of a barn of dead vampires, catching the news between the static on the broken radio he’d smashed when one of the daemons pinned him flat to the table, teeth snapping at his ears until he could worm a broken liquor bottle between its ribs.

“You were both there?” Nyx nodded towards Noctis.

“No. If I’ll thank the Six for anything it’s for keeping Noct out of town that day.”

Somehow, Nyx doubted that Noctis would agree. He knew that he didn’t, when it had been Galahd that fell, long before Insomnia had.  Being the last one standing in the ruins of your homeland did not a grateful initiate to the Astral faith make. Noctis was a haunted man, and now Nyx knew why. He could see Selena again, run through and left to rot as Nyx picked through the bones of their home. He wondered what had been left of Tredd when Noctis bloodied his hands digging through the rubble to find him, too.

“Yeah, Accordo sounds like it would be nice,” Tredd sighed, bumping his head back against the wall to stare at the ceiling. “A bitch to get to though. No money, no ID, no pulse; no entry from Galdin Quay, that’s for damn sure.”

Nyx considered the wrinkles of discontent furrowing Noctis’s brow in his sleep. He said he’d made Tredd because he didn’t want to be alone. Nyx wondered about his sister. Was that why he continued to exist? She had hoped she would make it out of there with him. She had hoped they would keep going together. That neither of them would be alone if they had each other. If only they could have gotten out alive.

* * *

“Just stay put. I’ll be back before nightfall.”

When Nyx said that he was leaving, Noctis didn’t have the energy to be excited like he would have been a day ago. He had nowhere to go and they both knew it. He’d find himself few friends in Lucis to run away to from a braggart bounty hunter.

Nyx didn’t say where he was going, just that he was coming back with help. He didn’t say what kind of help, if it came in the form of a “who” or a “what,” or even how he was going to come by this alleged help. He just said he’d get it, and then he was off. It was the least amount of words he’d said to Noct since he’d met him.

“So,” Tredd said once they heard the distant gutter of Nyx’s convertible pull onto the road. “We’ve got the old place to ourselves.” He gave Noctis a salacious grin, nudging his shoulder. “Wanna find a dry spot and figure out how this new body of mine works?”

Noctis pressed a hand to his face and shook his head. “I should have given your brain a better filter.”

“And gag all my great jokes? Only in bed, babe. Which we should find. And test.”

“Might’ve been easier to just sew your mouth shut, now that I think about it.” Noctis shoved lightly against Tredd’s shoulder, the body giving way beneath the teasing touch as effortlessly as if it were alive.

“Hey, speak for yourself! I wasn’t the one who had a problem with volume control.”

“Oh, Six, shut _up_.”

“I seem to recall you liking it more when _I_ shut _you_ up.”

Noctis took that opportunity to flee, climbing back up the hill from where they’d seen Nyx off. Tredd bobbed along at his heels, every movement long and exaggerated and simmering with as much swagger as Noctis remembered. While he couldn’t give him back his skin, Tredd inhabited Noct’s motley science project as if it had always been his.

He came off the operating table with a mastery of his fine motor skills, it would seem. Noctis hadn’t expected that. He’d been anticipating long hard months, maybe even years of rehabilitating Tredd into making his body functional. He’d been expecting linguistics lessons, eating, walking, and basic bodily function training akin to raising a child. He’d feared amnesia, had taken great cares with his limbic system yet still dreaded that Tredd would wake up and have no idea who he was.

He had never even dreamed anything near what Tredd had ended up being. He wasn’t born again so much as just woken up. Like he’d been asleep for a mere ten hours, not burdened by a death of ten hard years.

That lost time was better represented in the wilting walls of the shack.

It had never been a proud structure, not by any stretch of the imagination. It had always looked hastily put together, wooden boards discolored by age and wind and salt and a constructor’s failure to order enough of one type of wood. It had never been pretty, but it had always been strong, braving the harsh howls of the sea and the war alike. But it couldn’t outlast time, it would seem.

Those old, mismatched boards had gone to rot, big gaping holes in the roof, the broken shingles and shattered ceiling beams like punched out teeth against the overcast sky. There was a tumble of dead planks on the eastern side where the porch had been. The front door had been blown off and away to oblivion somewhere, there were black squares of windowpanes missing, no more woodpile for the rickety old stove and seaside cookouts like he remembered.

He was afraid to see what had gotten inside. He didn’t want to know what the bedroom looked like. He knew that he couldn’t bear that.

“So, um… I guess nobody else made it out, huh?”

Noctis bit his lip. The silence was all the answer Tredd really needed.

There were a few, of course. Noctis hadn’t been the only one commuting from the city that day. He had his two friends with him that he affectionately referred to as his “royal guard” for how devoutly they followed him everywhere. Last he’d heard of Gladio he’d found his sister in Lestallum, the two of them taking up hunting to pay for their survival. Iggy was somewhere in Altissia, deciding to settle there, whereas Noctis felt compelled to return home by his “madness” as Iggy called it. Noctis couldn’t really blame him for the heat behind that barb, but he’d always regretted how they’d left things.

He’d hoped…

He blinked away the hot sting of anger in his eyes. The ship wasn’t here. Galdin would be pointless. He would never leave Lucis again, he was sure of it. He’d come back to an empty husk of a home, nothing but ghosts there to greet him.

…But he had Tredd. He had proof that he must not have been totally mad after all.

“Welp, we’ve got a shitload of time to kill before tall, dark, and please dick me returns, so…”

“Tredd!”

“What? … _What_? I’m not dead, Noct. I _was_ dead. And it’s fine, he’s gone so, you can stop pretending you don’t want to tap that, too.”

Noctis gave a callous little laugh, crossing his arms and glaring at the old summer house as if Nyx himself had dismantled it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “He’s essentially holding us hostage. _Not_ sexy, I don’t care what the fetishists say.”

“Ya’know what _is_ sexy, though? Saving your life. I can attest that it is _very_ attractive to have a savior.”

Noctis deliberately avoided Tredd’s toothy grin. Why’d he have to go and find him such a nice smile? And why didn’t he take out the brazenly observant part of his frontal lobe? And more importantly, why didn’t Noctis do something about his own blush response while he was tinkering with brains?

“Aahh, see?” Tredd said, needling a dark finger into Noct’s arm. “Don’t front, I know when you’re crushing. I remember you protesting too much the same way with an equally tall, even more dashing hero with a square jaw and big pecs. Better hair, though.”

He flitted a hand through his flame-orange hair, one of the few features Noctis had been able to recover which were original to Tredd. It had always been one of his favorite parts of him, distinct from most anyone else living in Insomnia. It was different – all of Tredd had been different – during a time in his life where Noctis was in desperate need of different.

He’d been bright, cocky, loud and arrogant; everything Noctis hated. Which he told him. Often. But that never dissuaded Tredd. Not for a single beat. He didn’t give up, and eventually, that stopped becoming annoying to Noctis and became more admirable. It had been a time where it felt like everyone was giving up on him. It was good to have at least one person who didn’t. He’d owed it to him, after Insomnia fell, not to give up on Tredd in return.

Noctis looked back at the house, whining against the dismal breeze shaving in above the sea. The walls were all chaos, all haphazardly put together, different planks from different piles; a discordant collage of lost pieces trying to make themselves whole. Waiting for someone to sew them back together again.

He glanced at Tredd.

“I guess if we could owe Nyx anything, a decent place to rest when he gets back might be a good start, right?”

“Rest… _Sure_ , Noct.”

“You’re losing your experimental sex privileges more and more every second.”

“No! Okay, okay, how do I earn them back?”

Noctis released a long, anxious breath as he looked over the shack. He had fixed a person back into life. That had to have been a great deal harder than fixing a house. Noctis nodded to the black menace of a front entrance, moaning ominously.

“You can start by going in first.”

It wasn’t as bad going inside as he’d feared. He didn’t find any childhood mementos crushed beneath the caved in ceiling or any other personal effects that might have belonged to his family, moldering away to ruin. They were all cleared away to time and travel and gone to better hideaways than Insomnia he hoped.

There was a lot of debris – fallen ceiling beams and shingles, blown in bracken and weeds crawling between the floorboards – all of it scaly with salt and sand and bloated with the misty air. The nests of various animals clotted in every corner, long-since abandoned when the roof collapsed, he suspected. The stairs wheezed treacherously when he dared to venture up them, one so rotted from the rain that his foot went straight through it. But he managed to get to the next floor without breaking his neck, nervous, then relieved when he pushed the doors open on the landing.

The bedrooms were mostly intact, if a little damp. Bare though it was of comfy furnishings, the left-most room was still as bright and airy as Noctis remembered. The porthole window was still there from when he used to take a telescope as a child and pretend he was some stranded pirate captain searching for ships or sea creatures on the horizon. _Maybe_ he could do something about the bedframes, at least. There were no mattresses left behind, but if he got creative, he thought he could stuff the bedrolls and whatever blankets Nyx might have in his trunk along the edges to make more comfortable sleeping arrangements.

By some act of divine providence, Tredd found a somehow untouched and totally undamaged emergency kit in the downstairs closet, complete with matches and a flashlight and some first aid supplies; some canvas tarps and emergency flares, even some fishing supplies were hidden away in the lockers of the storm cellar. Noctis even found a broom still in one piece.

They spent the day gutting as much of the ground floor as they could. Noctis rolled his sleeves to his elbows and pulled his hair back with an old elastic band he kept in his pocket, and inspected each nest for signs of inhabitants before deeming them safe to remove. He piled everything outside, kicked some stones together, and made himself a temporary fire-pit.

He didn’t _need_ to burn any of it, really. But he _wanted_ to. He wanted to see ten years’ worth of abandonment and neglect go up in smoke. He wanted to scorch out any regrets that were left to stain his old sanctuary.

Tredd was able to lift the heavier pieces of wood strewn throughout the house to give the fire a better foundation to burn off of, breaking them off at the rot to form them into a nice and symmetrical pyramid for Noctis to stuff the dead leaves and twigs and unused nests inside. It was all so wet and soggy with muck that Noctis didn’t expect it would ignite. It took more than one match – many of his first tries dousing under the dampness – before he managed to find the right placement and gathered drier branches from further downhill to set the thing ablaze.

“Are you okay around fire?” Noctis asked once the little yellow flames began to steady.

Tredd gave him a strange look, brow furrowed. “Yeah. Why?”

Noctis shrugged. “Just wondering. Undead don’t like fire, the way the stories tell it.”

“Those stories were written by superstitious sycophants,” Tredd snorted. “You’re a scientist, Noct, come on.”

“Then be assured by science that everything is flammable. And you’re like thirty percent formaldehyde so…”

Noctis waved Tredd a safe distance away from the fire. Which was ninety percent white steam as the flames mangled with the wet patches for a long while. But it had enough dry pieces to stay lit and a light wind to coax it a little higher if it started to wane. They spent hours piling all of the wreckage outside and feeding it into the fire when enough of the debris had curled down into charcoal. Noctis was grateful for the warmth against his fingertips, the sun hidden deep behind the gray sheen of clouds overhead.

By the time they’d emptied the worst of it from inside the house, they were both brown with dirt, Noct’s arms slimy to his elbows with old rain and gods only knew what else. He flexed his fingers over the fire to chase away the clammy numbness that was clasping the joints. He was in desperate need of a shower after sinking his fingers into the backs of more bugs than he’d spotted in time to chase out the door before throwing away whatever derelict sanctuary they’d made in the disgusting wood destined for the pyre.

He hadn’t stopped to think about how far in his future the next stop catering running water might be. And he wouldn’t even dare to hope that the bathrooms were functioning on Caem. It was going to be an icy-cold salt bath down in the tide-pools, he figured. The thought almost made him regret the clean-up in the first place.

“Worn out already?” Tredd crowed as he threw the last scraps onto the “to purge in hellfire” pile. “Come on, what’s next up on the list?”

“I think we’ve done more than enough,” Noctis croaked out a laugh.

He didn’t even know what had possessed him to the clean the place out in the first place. It wasn’t like they were going to stay there for very long. They’d stick around for one more night when Nyx came back with whatever provisions he’d promised, and then they’d need to keep moving. Find the next motel and figure out how to smuggle themselves out of the country. Maybe search for some untoward sailor out of a small port village that wouldn’t ask too many questions. The fire was useful for keeping him warm, but the longer he stared at the flames, the more futile he realized burning all the flotsam really was. It would just sweep back in the second they were gone.

Tredd slapped a cold palm against his shoulder as he passed. “I’m thinking roof next! Take some of those tarps and nail them over that big ol’ hole, what do you think?”

“I think, A: where are you going to find a hammer and nails? B: how are you even going to get up there? And C: there’s no point, Tredd.”

“Sure there is! You don’t want to be freezing your ass off all night again, right? I would be remiss in my love of that ass if I didn’t keep it warm.”

Tredd swung out his arms and turned his face up towards the broken roof, cocking his head to the side and scrunching an eye as if that would better magnify some hidden footholds he could use to get up there.

If Noctis had been feeling any amount of pride in himself for how well-formed Tredd’s cognitive functions had turned out, it escaped him in a long-suffering exhale. Tredd clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and clamped them around the bottom half of a rusted fire escape ladder drooping from the corner gutter.

“Tredd, don’t, you’re going to split your stitches.”

“That’s what I have you for!”

Noctis couldn’t blame a lack of logic on faulty wiring. Tredd had always been predisposed to chaotic impulses. The more Noctis watched him, the more that he thought he’d done a little _too good_ of a job bringing him back. Maybe he could have programmed a little bit more self-preservation in there, a touch more conscientiousness, padded his memory with the brain tissue of a less impulsive mind…

But then, well, it wouldn’t be Tredd filling those stitches. Not whole and not in six pieces when the ladder inevitably tore like paper under his weight.

“Welp,” Tredd’s undone head huffed as it rolled off his torso. “This feels familiar.”

Noctis closed his eyes, inhaled a breath, and begged the gods he knew didn’t exist to give him patience. He wasn’t done fixing his undead lover just yet.

“I think my ‘volume problem’ may have stemmed from how much you don’t listen,” Noctis sighed as he knelt beside the myriad of limbs strewn from their stitches.

The right leg, the left arm, a hand, and his head all quartered off from each other in the dirt, still as the corpses he’d taken them from without the brain connected to give them signals. At least his head still worked independently of his body. That was… something.

“What can I say, I’ve got a hard head,” Tredd mumbled.

Noctis cradled his face in his hands, bringing his head up to eye level so that he could better scowl at him in admonishment. It never had an effect on him. Not even when his head was separate from his body. Tredd just grinned, as if it had always been his intention to end up in such a state. He was never wrong, no matter what. Not when he was five pieces on an abandoned cliff-face, not when he was pulp underneath an airship; somehow, he made it all seem like everything was going according to his plan.

“This is what got you killed, you know,” Noctis said.

“It got you to smile. I’d say that’s worth dying for.”

Noctis bit his lip, and it was only then that he realized Tredd was right. He felt his own lips turned up in an unfamiliar curve, the edges cracking where they were chapped against the small strain of holding it up. Tredd’s head grinned at him, a simpler smile than the bravado baseline he always started with. It was a more honest smile, wide-eyed and softer, and just so stupidly smug about achieving the little things that were so important.

“I missed you, you know,” Noctis murmured. “Haven’t had the chance to tell you that yet.”

“You, too.” Tredd paused, smile turning into a line and dark russet brows coming together. Noctis knew that if his hand was attached, his thumb would be grazing against the scar on his mouth as he thought. A brief cloud of doubt. “We had fun, right?”

“Yeah. We had a lot of fun.”

So much fun that he went crazy enough to put him back together again to have some more. So much fun that the first person he wanted when he was feeling alone wasn’t his closest friends still alive, but a man long dead. He’d wanted him so badly, and he just had to have him. He was madder not to try than to give up and let him die.

Noctis placed a very careful kiss upon Tredd’s lips while his head was in his hands. It wasn’t quite the same – cold and uneven, stiff and – to a saner person – probably the most unpleasant feeling in the world – but Noctis hadn’t been sane for a very long time. He didn’t want to be. It was only when he was crazy that he achieved the impossible. If he had to be mad to bring back the dead, then mad he would stay.

“I leave you two alone for one whole day…”

Nyx’s voice startled him, not expecting him to be back so soon when it was still hours before nightfall. And he certainly wasn’t expecting to see the state he was in when he turned.

His coat was black with blood and scourge, shirt clawed to ribbons, his hair matted with mud and more blood so dark it could have been dirt covering his eye. One arm hung lamely in a make-shift sling across his chest. He made it hardly a half a step more to the summer shack before careening face-first into the dirt. A can of beans tumbled from the bulging rucksack on his shoulder. And the weathered leather suitcase in his hand jingled with the unmistakable sound of gil when he hit the dirt.

They stared at his prone figure for one more moment of shock before Tredd had the tact to say, “Welp. Looks like you’ve got yourself another fixer-upper, Noct.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ask me about the science behind how Tredd works, this is based in a universe where a kid can pull ghost swords out of a pocket dimension and chickens are big enough to ride. His disembodied head is functional because headless kisses are... cute? Science! Comment for kisses and the sake of science! :)


	5. boo!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As if this day couldn't get any worse.

He was exhausted.

He would not have spent his day on hysteria-driven home repair if he knew he’d be snapping together dislocated limbs by the end of the night.

He had to leave Tredd in a haphazard pile of disconnected pieces by the front steps while he dragged Nyx inside to treat the worst of his wounds. The hunter maintained a quarter of consciousness, just enough to nag Noctis throughout the whole process. His protests and posturing swirled together as if he were drunk, the weight of his body bearing down on Noct’s shoulders the whole sloppy struggle into the shack.

He managed to situate him by the rusted remains of the woodstove, near the kitchen. In his haste to get his patient into as close of a sterile environment as he could, he forgot that his hope for running water was completely obsolete. _Maybe_ he could coax some from the crusty old faucet. Or maybe Nyx had brought bottled water in his sack of goodies.

He tried the sink first because it was closest – and a secret, selfish part of him was just hoping beyond hope that there was still some life worth saving in the old shack. It felt like the whole house snuffled awake when he ground the handles forwards. The walls heaved and the pipes balked and for a very, _very_ long time – long enough for Noctis to rush downstairs to find that fishing wire he’d seen and long enough for him to dig through the cupboards for any alcohol that could have been left behind – nothing happened.

He truly didn’t get his hopes up for fresh water, fully prepared to run down beneath the lighthouse for salt water if he really needed it. By the time anything squelched into the sink, he’d found a chipped bottle of half-finished whiskey coated in cobwebs, a grimy old bucket, and a grungy dish towel to clean up the thickest patches of blood and dirt. Noctis barely gave the faucet a glance as it choked and sputtered gods only knew what into the drain. If he was going to get anything useful out of it, he’d have to let it run for a while yet, anyway.

“You know there’s no point in that, right?” Nyx’s eyes rolled to the side, tracking the doctor’s movements with a paler gaze than had been glaring at him since they’d met. “Your bullet took like an hour to close up. This is no worse.”

Noctis didn’t waste the long-suffering look at Nyx’s broken arm to make his point otherwise. Though, once Nyx had sat still in one spot for long enough to recover his consciousness, the state of his disrepair seemed to affect him less and less. Much as he understood the supernatural – after all those long, dark years of studying, he damn well better have – Noctis had yet to disconnect his brain from equating blood to medical emergency to “yes, that means you, doctor.” Logically, he knew that Nyx apparently only needed an hour or two to recover from what would have been a fatal injury to a regular human being, but it was hard to apply that particular logic to practice.

“Yeah, well, you’re still a mess,” Noctis mumbled as an excuse.

He needed to feel useful. He needed something to fix. He needed to clean out the house, patch it up; wash up Nyx, bandage him up; piece together Tredd, sew him back up. He’d spent so long with that singular focus, of putting Tredd back together again, that now he’d accomplished it… He wasn’t sure what to do with himself from there. He’d never expected to succeed. He hadn’t thought past that one, electric moment in the lab. He needed to give his hands something to do until he figured out how to stop.

For as much as Nyx insisted that he would be fine, the hunter didn’t move to stop Noctis once. He let him obsess. He let his hand hold tight to the back of Nyx’s head and let the other scrape his whiskey-soaked rag through the gunk on his face. He didn’t jerk away or shrug him off, just let him work while he sat and healed.

The cleansing revealed that there was a long cut on his head, just along the rightmost shave of his scalp. Noctis couldn’t tell if it was made by knife or claw. It had been worse before Nyx came back, if the amount of blood he was wringing into the bucket was any indicator. He was healing, just like he’d promised, but Noct’s instinct immediately had him reaching for the fishing wire. Nyx pressed his palm over his wrist to catch him.

“I really wouldn’t,” he advised. “Don’t know how that’s going to heal. Besides” – he jerked his head towards the gaping hole where the front door used to be – “Think Stitches needs it a little more than I do.”

That was true enough. Still, he felt like he wasn’t doing enough.

Noctis stared down at Nyx’s hand over his. He had a steady touch, purposeful and singular, focused to one point. He always seemed to have a purpose, never at a loss for what he was supposed to do. He knew what to do with his hands. He knew how to stop and slow and figure out what was next.

“You said that you were getting help,” Noctis murmured, carefully extricating his wrist from Nyx’s grip.

“And I did.”

Food and gil. Enough canned goods to last them on the road and enough money to pay their way towards wherever they wanted to go. They couldn’t have asked for more. Nyx had already spared them their lives, lied for them to the contractors that suspected Noct’s grim deeds in the graveyards, took them all the way to Caem with barely a question asked, and now, he’d gone and gotten himself hurt to ensure they kept surviving after that.

“And I guess whoever this belonged to” – Noctis indicated the stains of blood and scourge on Nyx’s coat that he knew weren’t his own – “wasn’t the philanthropic type.”

Nyx shrugged, slow and sure and smiling like he’d just woken up on a nice, plush mattress and not the cold, hard floor. “Behemoths rarely are,” he said, as if that was explanation enough.

Noctis was good enough at hypothesizing to narrow down a theory. Another contract, this one bigger than most. Big money for big game. Enough of a payout for a giant sack of food and plenty more to spare. Noctis only wondered why Nyx would waste such a bounty on him and Tredd. Nyx could live like a wayfaring prince in the Galdin bungalows with the kind of gil clinking together in that suitcase. He could sail away to Altissia himself, earning even more if he rolled back on his word and turned the two of them in. Noctis couldn’t draw a conclusion for that.

“Why go through all this trouble?” Noctis had to ask. “Why risk your…”

Nyx lifted a brow and neither of them need say any more. Noctis breathed out a sigh, dousing the dishrag with more whiskey as he inspected Nyx for more open wounds. He rephrased the question.

“Why waste your time?”

“I’ve got plenty of time to waste. Think it’s better wasted on a couple of attractive strangers than by myself with motel TV, ain’t it?”

The faucet gurgled and hissed, interrupting any thought Noctis could put into forming a response. He got to his feet to inspect the results rather than figure out why his chest felt like it was burning.

There was a mess of mud and all other sorts of shit in the sink from all the gagging the faucet had done while he tended to Nyx. Now, water trickled red with rust down the drain. The house was bleeding, he thought, draining itself of infection.

Noctis watched the choppy stream, waiting for it to clear up enough that maybe he could boil out the bacteria. For what purpose, he didn’t entirely know anymore. Just to prove that there was something worth saving in the house, he supposed. Maybe he could use it for the food Nyx had brought, maybe steam something into edibleness over the fire dwindling outside.

He heard the bottle cap of the whiskey pop off, and Nyx’s throat work around a deep gulp of it. He must have been hungry, right? Did immortals still get hungry? They just couldn’t die of starvation.

Noctis didn’t know how to apologize for shooting him in the chest, or how to thank him for all he’d done for them, other than to try cooking him a meal.

“I need to sew up Tredd,” he said, dumping what was in the bucket and filling it as best he could with yellowing water.

“You do that, Doctor.”

“Just Noct. ‘Doctor’ is what they put on my wanted poster.”

Nyx lowered the whiskey and grinned, a promise between the crags of his lips. He was already starting to regain his color – a pale bronze not unlike a sunset’s reflection in the sea. As the pain subsided, his eyes honed down to their regular sharpness, gray-blue as new steel and piercing beneath Noct’s skin as if he could see so much more than what he was saying.

Noctis got out of there before he could be accused of staring.

He blamed Tredd for this, planting the idea of mutual attraction in his head with his teasing. They were in the middle of a crisis, literally walking the line between life and death. He did not have the time or the patience to be entertaining the notion of romance or sex or anything even remotely in the realm of intimacy.

Outside, the sky was growing dark as the unseen sun faded behind the clouds. Pinpricks of rain needled into his skin and plucked white wisps of steam from the wood pyre. The wind had gone cold, the air pregnant with the scent of a storm purpling the horizon further out to sea.

_Great,_ Noctis thought. _This day just keeps getting better._

“Is the other marvel of medical science gonna make it?” Tredd asked from where his head was perched atop his torso. “Or am I doomed to walk the earth as the last of my kind?”

“I’d hardly consider you a marvel.”

“That’s cold, Noct. Real cold.”

Well, that fit how he felt. His hands were cold, his heart was hot, and his muscles were shaking. Between the hunger and the fatigue and the weather and the stress and the confusion and the endless scroll of travesties happening in his life, he truly impressed himself when he managed to correctly match the right limb to the corresponding socket.

“I’d give you a hand, but…” Tredd’s eyes aimed down to where one of his hands had fallen off.

“I could have made a fortune between the two of you,” Noctis sighed.

“Hey, you never know! Maybe necromantic surgeons are in a higher demand over in Accordo. Could open your own little clinic! It’ll pay for all that wine we’ll be wiling away the rest of our lives on.”

Noctis pursed his lips. “You’re awfully optimistic.”

“I dunno. I’d say we’re looking a lot better than we were a day ago. Now, we’ve got money, food, a hot ride…” He rolled his eyes towards the house where Nyx was resting, unable to move his head, but raising his eyebrows in a suggestive bounce.

Noctis sighed and shook his head. Would that he had the bottomless energy that Tredd seemed to always have. Maybe he would have been inclined to agree with him.

Noctis sewed back on the limbs that needed the least stitching first before he remembered that he wanted to boil water before the thunderclouds burst and doused their fire. He did his best to jury-rig a quick spit to suspend the bucket of water over the flames. Precarious though it may be, it was enough to set it to simmer.

“H’okay,” he huffed, hands on his hips. Noctis surveyed the lawn, messy with dismembered body parts belonging to a talking head, dirt ruddy with the dragged blood of a mauled immortal bounty hunter, and a pyre of soggy wood from a mad scientist’s haunted home boiling what amounted to sewer water in a crack-pot effort towards something even remotely resembling sanitation.

If the insanity of his life could be encapsulated in a single image, he would be hard-pressed to find one more definitive than this.

“Noct?” the bodiless head of his long-dead lover asked. “You okay?”

Oh Six, he’d been crashed so deep in the ditch off the side of the road to “okay” that he wasn’t even sure he knew how to drive it anymore.

“Are you?” he fired back, a little too sharply than he intended. He nodded at the fishing wire to redirect the blow. “You good if I run down to the car for a quick sec?”

He was just going to have to be. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere, anytime soon.

“Dead boyfriend in five pieces, shredded up eye candy on the kitchen floor, childhood home in ruins, and I feel a migraine coming on. Fantastic,” he mumbled to himself as he walked off alone.

He could almost hear the voice of his old friend Ignis in his ear, politely condemning him for his delusive ideas of reanimation and returning to Lucis. Noctis honestly didn’t know which of those two things had frightened old Specs more. If only he could get back to Altissia, Noctis could trade an equal helping of “I told you so” with Ignis. Bringing back the dead had been so much easier than walking through what remained of his homeland.

He could rebuild a body, but not a country. He could barely plug up the holes in a building, let alone the millions of mountainous spires that had pierced the heavens above Insomnia. He wasn’t a politician, much as he knew his father might have wanted him to be. He couldn’t dismantle the Imperial influence darkening the lands he’d barely gotten the chance to explore in his youth.

He couldn’t even let them know that he was alive, and that he was traveling with a talking cadaver that stopped being alive ten years ago. Gods, if they knew that reanimation like Tredd’s was possible… Noctis shuddered to think of the monsters they could bring back. As if there weren’t enough of them in their high chairs already, the worst of the Imperial figureheads had been destroyed by their own daemonic creations at the end of the war.

Noctis could still remember the way his stomach dropped every time he saw the Emperor’s face broadcast across emergency reports. Ignis had accused him of being mad when he’d left Altissia, but the Emperor of Niflheim? Talk about a case study.

Nyx had parked his car as far up the hill as the snares of vegetation would allow. As Noctis drew closer, he could see black scourge and blood staining the driver’s seat – though it wasn’t as if the car was lacking for ambiguously worrisome stains. The trunk was ajar, not quite enough strength in Nyx’s arm to slam it down all the way. Which worked just fine for Noctis. There had to be something more in there that he could use to help them all make it through the night.

He ended up finding more weapons than anything stowed away in there. A gun that looked like it didn’t get much use, a set of odd, curved daggers, and a whole host of other sharp and pointy instruments for any given situation between Nyx and a daemon of any shape, size, or sinful thirst for human flesh. There were green glass vials of half-used potions, antidotes and remedies and a small stockpile of curatives for any ailment that could be contracted while facing down monsters in the dark.

As if Nyx really needed them… Maybe he did? Noctis didn’t even know where to begin to figure out the limitations to the man’s immortality, if there even were any. Whatever, it wasn’t his place to ask. The whole world had stopped asking once the war was over. It was questions like that which had built those Niflheim daemons in the first place.

Noctis put his hands to work again, finding some threadbare blankets and old clothes and making himself a little sack to carry the curatives and whatever other essentials Nyx had stored away back up to the house.

He wasn’t the only one on his way up there though.

“I think I see light up ahead!”

“Tire tracks, too.”

Noctis froze, crouched behind the trunk of the car the instant he’d heard the voices of strangers. They were hard, gruff voices, carried above heavy footsteps prowling through the brush. He didn’t recognize the people, but he recognized their intent. He’d grown familiar with the sounds of malice. Of vengeance. Of hunters. Of the irony penalized to him for daring to think “well, at least things can’t possibly get worse.”

* * *

Watching Noctis race up the hill with a sack of pointy things probably should not have been as amusing to Nyx as it was. The alarm should have registered leagues before the doctor dropped everything inside with a noisy clatter and rushed through the singular warning of “hunters.”

Nyx knew that he shouldn’t have been nearly as surprised as he was. It wouldn’t be the first time that he was stalked by scavengers too scared to earn a bounty themselves. One man was much easier prey than one whatever the contractor wanted dead. Once the gil exchanged hands, it was anyone’s game.

“I can’t believe you!” Noctis snapped. “You lead them straight to us!”

He invented a new insult after every pass between the front lawn and the shack. He threw everything that he could into the storm cellar – the old emergency supplies, the new food Nyx had brought, the halfway boiled water, everything he’d managed to grab from Nyx’s trunk, the attaché of gil that the strangers were so keen on. It was quite the spectacle. Noctis looked like he was preparing for a hurricane instead of a siege. Nyx wasn’t quite sure how to tell him that there was no hiding from hunters. He couldn’t just bar them all in his cellar and expect it to blow over.

“Man,” Tredd said as he passed, head tucked beneath Noct’s arm with the last of his detached limbs. “This new life is way more exciting than the last one! Never had this many men want me at the same time.”

He was tossed very unceremoniously into the cellar for that comment, thumping down the stairs with a series of rhythmic “oofs!,” “aahhs!,” and “gacks!”

Noctis struggled with the rest of Tredd, arms looped around the torso and heaving the dead weight up the porch steps. He threw a glare over his shoulder at Nyx, leaning just inside the door. He could only shrug, just barely able to flex his lame arm to prove that he couldn’t help.

“Some of us can still die, you know,” Noctis growled, breaths strained in his chest from the exertion.

“Then you better get moving, huh?”

Nyx could see the flashlights winking through the trees. He hauled Noctis to his feet with his good arm, despite the man’s protests as Tredd’s body thudded into the doorway.

“It’s fine. Just hide. I’ll take care of it.”

Nyx shoved him downstairs, picked up his pistol, and slammed both Noctis and the one part of Tredd worth saving in the cellar.

The rain picked up the closer that the hunters came to the house, dousing the bonfire outside. Nyx struggled himself into a halfway decent vantage point, squatting down amidst some old crates on the second landing, just above the front door. He could see them scouting the lawn below from the broken window.

Just three men, their accents marking them as Nifs. Not Imperial, not based on the plainness of their clothes and the baseness of their weapons. Just hunters, trying to make a living in the scrap of a world the Imperial might had left them all to grovel over.

“What in the bloody hell?”

One of them balked at the sight of the body in the doorway, headless and missing one arm and entirely unexpected.

“Poor sod. Must have tried his luck before us.”

“I am _not_ ending up like ‘im! No gil is worth that. Gods, the hell we stealing from that does _that_ to a person?”

Nyx rolled his eyes. And here he was thinking he had such a proud and fearsome reputation.

They were a chatty bunch, and not very organized. Nyx got the impression that they’d never done this before, that they were desperate for some gil and this was a last minute decision. They weren’t hardened professionals, not men that had seen death lurking red-eyed and scourge-blooded in the shadows. Not men that stayed awake haunted by what they’d seen every night.

They should be easy enough to scare off. Fire off some warning shots, puff up his chest a little, and they wouldn’t be bothering him again.

The one man stepped over Tredd’s body – at least he had the decency not to squish the creature’s brand new fingers. He stalked into the house, flashlight scanning the dark corners, the muzzle of a handgun tracking the stream of light.

Nyx could have descended on him right there. He could have hit him over the head or twisted his arm behind his back and intimidated the other two with threats of violence until they all scurried away with their tails between their legs. Easy. He’d done it a hundred times before.

A strange and sudden movement out of the corner of his eye stalled Nyx for a moment. He hadn’t been expecting that. Less did the man creeping deeper into the house.

When he felt a cold, dead touch on his shoulder and spun around to find a headless corpse waving its one hand at him, he screamed as high as an operatic falsetto.

Nyx had to clap a hand over his mouth to keep himself from laughing out loud.

The hunter stumbled over his own feet, ass hitting the wood floor hard enough to bruise. His flashlight spun wildly around the room to match his hysterical screaming. He seemed to completely forget the fact that he had a gun in his hand. Tredd’s body faced him, shoulders hunched and palm open in a gesture reminiscent of “what the fuck is wrong with you, dude?”

The other two hunters started shouting outside, their lights snapping towards the house. The screaming and scared hunter kept screaming and being scared, stumbling out onto the lawn as he ran from the corpse. Questions and confusion were barked at him as he blindly bolted back down the hill, a descending crescendo of terror and piss.

When Tredd’s body lumbered into the doorway, the remaining hunters matched with two pairs of huge, unbelieving eyes. Their brains stalled for a minute, not quite sure that what they were seeing was really there.

Tredd gave them the finger. They both started screaming.

One hunter had the sense to fire a few random shots back to dissuade the thing from following. None of the bullets landed.

Tredd brought a hand to where his face would be, wiggling his fingers as if he was sticking his tongue out at them as they fled. That was enough to bust Nyx up with laughter.

“Holy shit! I didn’t even know you could do that!”

“I know, right? Neither did I!”

Noctis carried Tredd’s head from the cellar, laughing as intensely as Nyx was. His body matched his face, doubling over and shaking to match the breathless giggles resounding from the redhead. Nyx jumped down to meet them. He was nearly incoherent with his laughter.

“Damn, I could kiss you. That was incredible!” he wheezed.

“Why don’t you?” Tredd beamed. “Noct. Elevate me.”

Noctis rolled his eyes, but did as he was asked. Nyx didn’t miss the way he was pressing his lips together to keep himself from smiling. Or how he ducked his head beneath his chaotic mess of hair to escape either of them noticing how funny he thought the whole thing was.

“Well?” Tredd teased, looking expectantly at Nyx. “Pucker up, handsome.”

Nyx was laughing too hard. It took him a moment to recover himself before he complied. That kind of show warranted a reward. It was just a quick kiss, enough to make Tredd’s body stand up a little straighter. And enough to draw Noct’s notice. Nyx blinked in surprise when he felt a set of warm lips on his cheek, a gentle contrast to the coldness of Tredd’s.

“Thank you,” Noctis mumbled, eyes skittering away from meeting Nyx’s gaze. “For all you’ve done.”

“What did he do?” Tredd snorted. “I did all the work.”

Tredd’s one arm crossed over his torso in what would have been an indignant look. Noctis smiled, tired, but gentler than he had been. He craned his head down and kissed the red stalks of Tredd’s hair. “You too.”

The storm blustered in full force then, sheets of rain cascading through the hole in the roof, winds bullying the walls of the house until they whined. The hunters weren’t coming back. Nobody was, not in this weather. They were safe enough to sleep at Caem for one more night.

The bedroom was the driest and furthest away from the hole. They hunkered down with all the blankets and sleeping bags and layers of old clothes they could find, making a nest out of the driest corner against the wall. Any pretense of space wasn’t even considered, Noctis far too cold to care that he fell asleep against Nyx’s chest, Tredd’s body slumping on his other side with his head in his lap. All animation shut off when Tredd closed his eyes and started to snore.

What a night. What a _week._ In all his centuries on this earth, he’d encountered few creatures that could match the strangeness and excitement of Noctis and Tredd.

Nyx didn’t sleep. He hadn’t slept for hundreds of years. He didn’t need to, and tonight, he didn’t want to, even if he could. Tonight, he wanted to sit guard. He wanted to settle down with the warmth of another body against his. He wanted to smile at how obnoxious Tredd’s snoring was, how alive and completely human it was.

For once, Nyx wanted to stay. For once, he felt like if he closed his eyes, there was something to look forward to when he opened them again.

It was sunlight.

It was Noctis slapping Tredd’s hand away as he fussed over his stitches.

It was horrible instant coffee made with water that probably would have killed him if he could die. But not before Noct’s tentative smile did, as lethal as the bullet that shot him through the heart.

“Want to come to Altissia with us?”

Nyx looked around the shack, at the way Tredd was insisting on tacking a big tarp over the hole in the roof, even with Noct’s implication that he didn’t plan on staying. Even in his words, Nyx felt like Noctis didn’t really mean it. That as much as they’d worked to get them out of the country, the scientist’s heart wasn’t in Accordo. It was merely a means to an end. Not a home he looked forward to.

“I dunno,” Nyx said. “Thought I’d stick around here. Thought maybe you’d stick around with me.”

“Nyx, people are going to come for us. They’re going to know…”

“Know what? That a few hunters saw something scary out in the dark? That water is wet?”

Noctis pressed his lips into a line like Nyx was learning he always did when he was thinking. He looked around the house. This had been a home to him once. The sight of it in such decay had destroyed him so badly that he needed to gut it from the inside to make it better. Nyx knew that he didn’t want to abandon it again. But he also knew that he was afraid. For both himself and for Tredd. He didn’t want to lose him a second time.

Nyx chanced a hand over Noct’s, the doctor’s fingers tapping incessantly on the crate they’d pulled into the center room for a table. He made him stop. Made him see. Made him look up at him through his hair and listen.

“They’re going to know that I’m here.”

He was here forever. Might as well be somewhere he liked. With people he liked. Weird and wacky though they may be.

Underneath his hand, Noctis’s fingers curled into an anxious fist.

But it stayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have one last little epilogue to add on for the end. Expect that finish for tomorrow night!


	6. spooky scary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing says "good morning" like a cup of coffee and the shrill screams of some rowdy teens.

“No, it’s not haunted. No, I’m not harboring a serial killer. My boyfriend studies anatomy. Sometimes the limbs from his models end up in the carrot patch, he’s a klutz like that, what of it? Yes, this shotgun is loaded and, yes, I know how to use it. Now, why are you on my lawn?”

He was getting too old for this shit. Could he make it _any_ more obvious that he was too old for this shit? He’d put up signs warning against trespassing. He’d built a nice, _tall_ hardwood fence at the bottom of the hill. He’d even let the bushes grow as wild and ungainly as they damn well pleased to obscure the gate from curious, passing eyes.

_And yet_ , here he was still. Standing on the front porch in his underwear, pretending to have a fully loaded shotgun in his hands, and cursing at a bunch of doofy hipsters with some vapid, ghost-hunting blogspirations. His house was _not_ going to be the set of a found footage student film, fuck that.

“Aww!” Tredd whined as he walked up, looking forlornly after the side-eying group as they retreated. “Why you gotta keep scaring off our adoring public like that? I’ve been practicing my autograph and everything!”

“I just want to wake up, have my morning fuck and a cup of coffee without a bunch of pimply weirdos taking selfies on my front lawn. _Private_ property, it’s called _private property_ for a reason, damnit!”

“Sheesh,” Tredd snorted. “Wake up on the wrong side of Noct this morning?”

“I don’t have a wrong side.”

Noctis shuffled onto the porch in his slippers and robe, two cups of coffee in hand. He pushed one into the small of Nyx’s bare back, eyes barely open enough to aim for the right person.

“I’ll have to refresh the traps,” Nyx mumbled as he took his neglected coffee off the sleepy scientist’s hands. “The flash bombs must not have the same effect on people as they do daemons.”

“Probably doesn’t help that it’s the middle of the morning, huh?”

Nyx slanted a glare at Tredd and refused to comment. Noctis whined against the daylight, leaning his face between Nyx’s shoulder-blades as if he could fall back asleep right there.

“Maybe this’ll wake you up,” Tredd chuckled.

He’d gotten up early today – it was hit or miss with him; sometimes he was up before dawn, sometimes not until sunset. He’d been collecting the mail from the box down the hill when the intruders hopped the fence. They didn’t get much – no one knew their address but the people they’d told – so, he checked it once every week to see if their friends had sent them any gifts.

Today’s treasure was a neatly-wrapped, brown paper package, classically wound in thick white twine, stamped, and tagged in all the necessary spaces with precision accuracy. Noctis didn’t even have to look at the sender to know it was from Ignis. But he smiled at the sentiment scripted over the glossy white card concealed beneath the packaging when he opened it.

“ _Two Altissian reds to toast two years. May you share many more of them together. Ignis.”_

“Saw Gladio while I was down there,” Tredd said while Noctis fawned over the fine wines his friend had sent.

“Yeah?” Nyx grumbled, still cranky over the trespassers. “Was his next girlfriend with him?”

“Boyfriend, actually! Cute blond, lots of freckles, photographer. He’s dying to come up to the lighthouse to take pictures of the view.”

“No trespassers.”

“They’d be guests! We’re allowed to have guests, right?”

“Do you _want_ to be burned at the stake?”

“I don’t know if a body this hot can be burned.”

Nyx fired his shotgun at Tredd before remembering it was never loaded. He growled and slinked back inside to finish his coffee. And find some pants. But not before he took the wine with him, muttering something about how he was going to need it to get through today. Tredd filled the space he left behind for Noctis to lean on, pecking a kiss against his face to greet him.

“So, did I hear my arm was in the carrots again?”

“You’d know where you left it better than me.”

“You hide it just to mess with me, admit it.”

“Check the carrots, carrot-top.”

Tredd kissed him again, his lips feeling warmer and warmer every day that he used them – and he liked to use them a lot; they all did. He strolled around the garden, one arm swinging as he whistled to the morning. Noctis leaned against the porch railing, balancing his coffee cup next to his elbow. He rubbed the last bit of foggy sleep from his eyes, and looked out at Caem.

The salty sea breeze caressed the high grasses, brushing delicate fingers along the trunks of the trees, glistening with long green tendrils of full branches as they rustled in the wind. The sandy pathways shown like spun gold in the sunlight, padding the little garden off to the side where Tredd was camouflaging himself in amongst the carrots before dragging his lost arm into the wheelbarrow to cart off to his little repair station out back.

They were a ghost story to the rest of Lucis. They were an eccentric shut-in or a neighbor in witness protection. They were a weird tale strung throughout the niche bowels of the internet, written off as an odd mystery that the world was dying to uncover, but never would. Black magic and monsters were slowly fading with the day, leaving behind only stories and superstitions to spook people before bedtime. They had curious camera-phones at their doorstep most days. They were a little easier to scare away than pitchforks.

Noctis closed his eyes and breathed in deep. Salt spray, fresh grass, coffee brewing in the kitchen. And eggs, Nyx was cooking eggs. A thousand-year-old recipe, he told them. Nothing like how they were prepared nowadays. They were from another time, another life found again.

Caem had never felt so perfect. It had never felt so much like home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ending was inspired by an old conversation with nicrt! Thanks for sticking with me on this weird little Frankenfic adventure! I hope you've enjoyed!


End file.
